“Mrs. Maxwell, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but Mallory’s not on drugs. Do you really think she’d have an athletic scholarship if she was doing heroin? Penn State would kick her off the team in a heartbeat.”
An awkward silence settles into the room, and I realize Caroline is giving me a chance to explain myself. I can feel my tears welling up because this isn’t how it was supposed to happen. “Okay, wait,” I tell him. “Because, the thing is, I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
Adrian still has his arms around me, but his grip goes loose. “What does that mean?”
“I was going to tell you the truth tonight.”
“What are you talking about?”
And I still can’t do it.
I still have no idea where to begin.
“Mallory doesn’t go to Penn State,” Ted explains. “She’s spent the last eighteen months in rehab. In a halfway house. She was abusing prescription painkillers and heroin.”
“Plus other drugs she doesn’t even remember,” Caroline adds. “The brain needs time to heal, Mallory.”
Now Adrian isn’t holding me at all. Now I’m just hanging on to his body like a big sad pathetic monster, like a parasite. He shakes me off so he can see my face.
“Is this for real?” he asks.
“I’m not using,” I tell him. “I swear to you, Adrian, I am twenty months sober next Tuesday.”
And he takes a step back like I’ve struck him. Caroline rests a gentle hand on his shoulder. “This must be hard for you to hear. We just assumed Mallory had been honest with you about her history. We thought she told you the truth.”
“No, not at all.”
“Adrian, I work with a lot of addicts at the VA hospital. They’re good people, and our main goal is moving them back into society. But sometimes the timing isn’t right. Sometimes, we launch people before they’re ready.”
I look up at Caroline, furious. “That is NOT what’s happening here! I am not on drugs. And I am not a fucking illustrator! I swear to you, Caroline. Something is wrong with this house. The ghost of Annie Barrett is haunting your son, and now she’s haunting me, and this is her message.” I point all around the room, at all of the walls. “This is her story!”
And I know I must look crazy and sound crazy because Adrian studies me in a kind of bewilderment. He looks like he’s seeing me for the first time.
“But is the rest of it true?” he asks. “You lived in a halfway house? You used heroin?”
I’m too ashamed to answer, but he can read the truth on my face. Adrian turns and leaves the den and I go to follow him but Caroline blocks my way. “Let him go, Mallory. Don’t make this any harder for him.”
I turn toward the window and watch Adrian cross the flagstone walkway and his face is all twisted up with hurt. Halfway down the driveway he breaks into a kind of trot, like he can’t wait to get the hell away from me. He gets inside a black pickup truck and peels away from the curb.
And when I look back at Caroline, she’s holding a plastic cup. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
She walks me to the powder room. I go inside and reach to close the door, but she stops me, shaking her head. As if she’s worried I’m going to somehow manipulate my sample, like I carry around vials of clean urine just in case. Caroline does me the courtesy of turning her head while I drop my shorts and squat over the toilet. Having been tested many hundreds of times, I am well practiced in collecting clean samples. I can fill a four-ounce cup without spilling a drop. I set the cup on the edge of the sink, then pull up my shorts and wash my hands. The water runs black, filling the basin with grainy residue. I use a bar of soap to scrape at my fingers and palms, but the graphite clings to my skin like ink, like stains that will never come out.
“I’ll wait for you in the den,” Caroline says. “We won’t start until you get there.”
All my handwashing leaves a filthy gray ring on the immaculate white pedestal sink. Yet another thing to feel guilty about. I try to clean it up with some toilet paper, then I dry my hands on my shorts.
When I reach the den, Caroline and Ted are seated on the sofa and they’ve got my sample on the coffee table, resting atop a paper towel. Caroline shows me a dip card that’s still wrapped in cellophane, to prove it hasn’t been tampered with. Then she unwraps the card, exposes the five test strips, and lowers them into the cup.
“Look, I understand why you’re doing this, but it’s not going to come up positive. I swear to you. I’ve been sober for twenty months.”
“And we want to believe you,” Caroline says, and then she glances at the drawings all over the walls. “But we need to understand what happened here today.”
“I already told you what happened. Anya took possession of my body. She used me like a puppet. I didn’t draw any of these pictures! She did!”
“If we’re going to talk about this,” Caroline says, “we need to stay calm. We can’t shout at each other.”
I take a breath. “All right. Okay.”
“Now before you came to work here, we had a long talk with Russell about your history. He told us about your struggles—the false memories, the lapses—”
“This is different. I don’t have those problems anymore.”
“You know just a couple days ago, Teddy lost his box of drawing pencils. He came to me crying. He was upset because he couldn’t find them anywhere. And soon after that, all these pictures start magically appearing in your cottage. Doesn’t that seem like an extraordinary coincidence?”
I look down at the cup. It’s only been a minute. It’s still way too early for results.
“Caroline, I can barely draw a straight line. I took one art class in high school. I got a C plus. There’s no way I drew these pictures, I’m not that good.”
“My patients always say the same thing: ‘I can’t draw to save my life!’ But then they try art therapy and the results are extraordinary. They draw the most amazing images to work through their trauma. To process truths they’re not ready to face.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Look at the woman in your pictures. She’s young, she’s tall. She has an athletic build. She’s actually running, Mallory. Does she remind you of anyone?”
I see where she’s going but she’s wrong. “That’s not a self-portrait.”
“It’s a symbolic representation. A visual metaphor. You’ve lost your younger sister. You’re upset, you’re panicking, you’re desperate to bring her back—but it’s too late. She’s fallen into a valley of death.” She moves around the den, directing my attention from one picture to the next. “And then an angel comes to help her—nothing too subtle about that metaphor, right? The angel is leading Beth toward the light and you can’t stop them. Beth has crossed over, she’s never coming back. You know this, Mallory. It’s all here on the wall. This isn’t Anya’s story. It’s your story. It’s Beth’s story.”